The video playback was fairly clear and smooth if I capture movement on just one work space. No distortions were evident mousing within a single application or moving among several resized windows on one screen. However, that was not the case when the recorded screen session involved moving among different screens or work spaces -- then, the playback showed jerky movements and serious color distortions.

Last week, Valve released the first beta for SteamOS. Although traditionally supplied on a disc image, Valve made the process slightly easier for some people by allowing you to unzip it straight onto a USB stick. However, installing it properly is a little more complex, and the Valve instructions can only take you so far. Here’s our plain English guide to installing SteamOS, and how to use hardware not recommended by Valve.

Those dastardly devils at iFixit have managed to get their mitts on one of Valve’s 300 Steam Machine prototypes and, of course, torn it down. Inside is a quad-core Haswell Core i5-4570, a Zotac GTX 780 graphics card, 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport (PC3 12800) RAM, and a 1TB 5400 RPM Seagate hard drive. If you wanted to build your own SteamOS-powered doppelganger, it would set you back around $1300 to match Valve’s Steam Machine part-for-part.

More in Tux Machines

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Latest News

Tiny, stackable, Linux-based IoT module hits Kickstarter

On Kickstarter, Onion launched a tiny, Linux-based “Omega” IoT module, along with a dock, stackable expansion modules, a cloud service, and web app tools.
Onion’s Omega joins a growing number of single board computers and computer-on-modules for Internet of Things applications that have tapped Qualcomm’s MIPS-based, WiFi-enabled Atheros AR9331 system-on-chip. For a pledge of $25, Onion’s Kickstarter campaign offers the Omega computer-on-module combined with a “dock” that turns it into an sandwich-style single board computer.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

The LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September 2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two projects' development communities reveals some interesting differences.

11 Ways That Linux Contributes to Tech Innovation

Over the past six months I've asked new Linux Foundation corporate members on the cutting edge of technology to weigh in on what interesting or innovative trends they're witnessing and the role that Linux plays in them. Here's what engineers, CTOs, and other business leaders from companies including CoreOS, Rackspace, SanDisk, and more had to say.